Category: Christianity

﻿As middle-class Americans living our day-to-day lives, it’s easy to get preoccupied with our own problems. Where are my kids going to school? How can I get that promotion at work? I need to save up to buy my own place so I’m not burning money in rent. With all these issues going on in our own lives, who has time to think about someone else’s problems?

Unfortunately, letting your own life and problems completely consume you is no way to live. There is a whole host of reasons why it’s better to let yourself care for a cause outside of your own little bubble, and today I’m sharing a few reasons why I’ve found that serving others, specifically at-risk inner city youth, can change my life for the good.

Helping others makes me happy.

In this post here I talk about how volunteering can bring meaning to your own life as well as perspective. Sometimes until we see someone else’s life with all their problems, it’s easy to blow our own out of proportion. You can have the right family, the right job, and the right house, and still be consumed with what you don’t have. The missing element in your life may not be more stuff, but more compassion. More perspective. More friendship. It’s definitely worth a shot.

What kind of world will my kids face?

The world is filled with hurt people who end up hurting other people. Problems like poverty and violence exist no matter how hard we try to ignore them. Chances are the brokenness in this world will end up touching one of your kids sooner or later. While you can’t fix everything, you can make a small impact and teach your children to do the same.

What kind of legacy am I leaving here on earth?

When you die, do you think you will be remembered for how much money you made or how many things you owned? How about for how many vacations a year you took? Would you even want to be remembered for those things? What are your kids going to remember you for? How much time you spent with them? That’s pretty good.

How about how you had a heart of compassion for those less fortunate than you and how you sowed into the lives of inner city youth with your time and money, the two things that matter the most? That is the kind of legacy I want to leave for my kids.

For Christians: how am I living out the mandate of the Great Commission?﻿

I know that many of us who live in these beautiful United States of America claim to be Christian. Is that just a belief, or do our lives bear testimony to that belief? Sometimes we need to do a little self-evaluation: am I living mainly for myself, or is helping others a priority in my life? Inner-city youth are hungry for the truth of God’s Word. There are hundreds of thousands of believers living in the city who could easily take a little time out of their lives to share the gospel with them, or donate money to organizations that do so.

There are so many causes out there; so many excellent organizations and churches doing so much good. Ours is just one of many, but you are right here, right now, reading this. Maybe this is your time to change your life by changing someone else’s. For more information on how you can change the trajectory of an inner city youth’s life, visit starfishchicago.org.

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One of the most important things we can do at the center is to teach the Word of God to our kids, and to guide them into experiencing Him themselves in a way that greatly impacts their life. At Starfish we regularly teach the Word using multimedia, arts and crafts, music, and personal testimony. We recently taught them Bible meditation using a method that we’re sharing today in this post.

The reason we felt that Bible meditation is important to our kids is that it teaches them to be quiet before God, to listen to what He has to say, and to really think about Bible verses instead of just rushing through them. It’s very important to us that our kids experience a deep, legitimate connection with God, and that they aren’t just parroting things they’ve learned from us, but have really made a relationship with God their own.

We designed a worksheet that we’re sharing with you that guides kids into meditation. Rather than covering a lot of scripture, we think it’s best to choose one verse and break it into parts for the kids to chew on. Here is an example of a scripture our kids recently meditated on. Feel free to click on the image to download and print it for reference.

When we did this exercise, we had worship music playing softly in the background and we didn’t rush the kids into finishing but we let them take their time. If any of them had any questions, we had them silently raise their hands and a staff member would help them.

Here is the blank version you can click on to save and print so your kids (or you!) can use it for meditation:

We loved seeing what the kids wrote in the “ask God what it means” section. It’s also a great tool to open the kids up to discussion about God and the Bible. Let us know if you use our sheets and how it goes!

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About us

Starfish Learning Center has been providing homework help, Biblical guidance, mentoring, fitness and nutrition education and opportunities, and more in the Rogers Park neighborhood of Chicago for twenty years. To learn more or to partner with us to impact at-risk youth, visit our website at www.starfishchicago.org.